This document summarizes a presentation on when teachers can trust their intuition. It discusses how intuition is not always accurate due to cognitive biases and limitations in perceiving causality. While experience generally improves performance, research on teaching experience and student achievement has found mixed results. The document advocates for teachers to develop expertise through frequent, low-stakes practice with meaningful feedback to improve intuition over time.
10. Barriers to expert intuition
• Opportunity cost
• Institutional mindsets
• The power of practice
11. What we know about developing
expertise
• Frequent, low-stakes
observations
• Much better feedback on
learning
• Guided, purposeful practice
• A codified body of
knowledge.
12. Do teachers just get better?
Rivkin, Hanushek & Kain, Teachers, Schools, and Academic Achievement (2005)
13. Do teachers just get better?
Years of experience
Teachereffectsonstudents
achievement
Kraft & Papay (2014)
14. Do teachers just get better?
Kini & Podolsky (2016)
• Maybe we’ve used the wrong statistical
models? (fixed effects vs. cross-sectional
analyses)
– “Teaching experience is positively associated
with student achievement gains throughout a
teacher’s career.”
– “For most teachers, experience increases
effectiveness”
15. Does experience usually lead to
expertise?
[The finding that teachers don’t improve with experience]
seems counter-intuitive, given the evidence that
professionals in a wide range of contexts improve their
performance with experience. For example, a surgeon’s
improved performance is associated with increased
experience gained at a given hospital. An increase in a
software developer’s experience working on the same
system is associated with increased productivity. What is
common sense in the business world—that employees
improve in their productivity, innovation, and ability to
satisfy their clients as they gain experience in a specific
task, organization, and industry—is not the commonly
accepted wisdom in public education.
Kini & Podolsky (2016)
It
16. When can you trust the experts?
"Whether naïfs or experts, mathematicians
need to confront people who misuse their
subject to intimidate others into accepting
conclusions simply because they are based
on some mathematics.”
Ewing (2011)
17. Kind vs. wicked domains
• A ‘kind’ domain provides accurate &
reliable feedback (leads to expertise)
• A ‘wicked’ domain is one where feedback
on performance is absent or biased (leads
to over confidence)
Hogarth (2003)
18. Kind vs. wicked domains
Kind domains Wicked domains
Fire fighters Financial & political
analysts
Emergency room nurses Radiologists
Pilots Surgeons
Teachers?
21. A definition of learning
Learning is:
• the long-term retention of knowledge and
skills
• the ability to transfer between contexts
Retention = durability
Transfer = flexibility
23. Learning is invisible
• We can only infer learning from performance
• Current performance is a poor indicator of
learning
• Reducing performance might actually
increase learning
Robert A Bjork, UCLA
24. “It works for me!”
• How do you know?
• Are there any conditions in which you
would accept you were wrong?
• Faith ≠ feedback ≠ learning
25. 7 ways to improve intuition?
1. Select and/or create our environments by
‘apprenticing’ ourselves to experts
2. Seek feedback through “intelligent sampling
of outcomes”
3. Impose “circuit breakers”
4. Acknowledge emotions
5. Explore connections
6. Accept conflict in choice
7. Make scientific method intuitive
Hogarth (2003)
Hamre, B.K., Goffin, S.G. & Kraft-Sayre, M. (2009) Classroom Assessment Scoring System Implementation Guide: Measuring and Improving Classroom Interactions in Early Classroom Settings. http://www.teachstone.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/CLASSImplementationGuide.pdf
Instructional Support includes dimensions such as a the extent to which interactions promote higher order thinking, give formative feedback, and use language to promote thinking
